What's Left Unsaid? Detecting and Correcting Misleading Omissions in Multimodal News Previews
This addresses a covert harm in social media news consumption, though it is incremental as it builds on existing multimodal detection methods.
The paper tackles the problem of misleading news previews on social media that omit crucial context, causing interpretation drift, and introduces OMGuard, a method that improves detection accuracy to match a 235B LVLM and provides stronger end-to-end correction.
Even when factually correct, social-media news previews (image-headline pairs) can induce interpretation drift: by selectively omitting crucial context, they lead readers to form judgments that diverge from what the full article conveys. This covert harm is harder to detect than explicit misinformation yet remains underexplored. To address this gap, we develop a multi-stage pipeline that disentangles and simulates preview-based versus context-based understanding, enabling construction of the MM-Misleading benchmark. Using this benchmark, we systematically evaluate open-source LVLMs and uncover pronounced blind spots to omission-based misleadingness detection. We further propose OMGuard, which integrates (1) Interpretation-Aware Fine-Tuning, which used to improve multimodal misleadingness detection and (2) Rationale-Guided Misleading Content Correction, which uses explicit rationales to guide headline rewriting and reduce misleading impressions. Experiments show that OMGuard lifts an 8B model's detection accuracy to match a 235B LVLM and delivers markedly stronger end-to-end correction. Further analysis reveals that misleadingness typically stems from local narrative shifts (e.g., missing background) rather than global frame changes, and identifies image-driven scenarios where text-only correction fails, highlighting the necessity of visual interventions.